In an enterprise networking environment, wide area network (WAN) links, such as from a branch office to a data center/central server location, suffer from low bandwidth/high latency problems. Such slow links often result in poor application performance and a lot of user frustration, as well as reduced productivity. For example, applications and users often need to wait for file data, wait for Internet and intranet content, and so forth.
Various server caching mechanisms have been used to avoid slow WAN links. However, such caches have their own issues, such as needing to handle security, handling only certain protocols, needing to cache full pages in anticipation of user demand, and so forth. In general, any improvement in reducing WAN usage in retrieving content is highly desirable.